World Of Warcraft has fully re-launched in China after almost four months of downtime.
The majority of regional subscribers have been without access to the game since early June after NetEase signed a three year licensing deal with Blizzard to become WOW's new local operator, taking over from The9.
Operator changeovers in China are particularly problematic due to the government approval process imposed upon launches - or re-launches - of services such as MMORPGs, all of which require an official licence.
The title partially re-launched in early August with a series of government-enforced content changes following a review by the General Administration of Press and Publication, a governmental agency that deals with censorship.
According to WOW.com, NetEase has spent over a million yuan (about $146,000) per day to maintain the game and its servers during the past month of closed beta.
Working for WOW China must be one of the easiest jobs right now within the industry, ..so much downtime on the franchise meens your pretty much being paid for doing nothing. Nice nice?
Anyway, I highly doubt the chinese players are happy about the huge downtime, so what refunds are they getting? Oo. be funny to read some day in the future "NO REFUND GIVEN" ..lawl. Blizzfail.
Anyway, I highly doubt the chinese players are happy about the huge downtime, so what refunds are they getting? Oo. be funny to read some day in the future "NO REFUND GIVEN" ..lawl. Blizzfail.
They'll be p**sed about the downtime for sure, but they use a completely different pay model for subscriptions so the refund issue is probably non-existent. It's pretty much equivalent to a "pay as you go" mobile model as far as I can see:
“To use our fee−based online games, a customer must register an account in our Pass9 system. Once registered, the customer may log into our network, select and activate the desired games and the game districts where the customer wishes to play, and then charge his account with a prepaid card or prepaid online points sold by Internet cafés or given by us through our promotional events that enable the customer to play for a specified period of time.
Each customer needs to maintain only one Pass9 account, which provides information regarding the customer’s available prepaid game playing time for each selected game district and payment history. A customer can purchase game playing time through any of the following methods:
Prepaid Cards. A customer can buy prepaid cards at retail outlets including convenience stores, supermarkets and bookstores all across China. Each prepaid card contains a pass code representing game playing time offered by the card based on its face value.
Prepaid Online Points. Over 120,000 Internet cafés across China have used our self−developed eSales System, which is part of our Pass9 system and enables an Internet café to buy prepaid online points from our distributors and sell such points to their customers.
Online Payment. A customer can buy game playing time online by charging payment directly to a credit or debit card. In addition, we offer free online game playing time to our new registered customers and users of our SMS service. We have also included free game cards in our marketing materials to attract new customers. Our integrated membership management and payment system also incorporates a variety of community−building features, such as chat rooms which provide registered users a platform to interact in real−time groups or one−on−one discussions, and bulletin boards which allow registered users to post notes or inquiries and respond to other users’ notes or inquires. We believe these features encourage user congregation on our site and facilitate player interaction for the games we offer.”
Maybe I'm reading it wrong (and this from when The9 were running WoW), but that's the way it looks to me.
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